The Cruelest Fate
by my-echo
Summary: Erik's introspective angst as he watches a familiar sleeping form from outside her window...but perhaps she is not who you are initially led to believe. Slightly AU, and not everything is what it seems.


**A/N: This isn't my usual. Slightly AU, though not really. Erik-introspection with a very interesting twist. As you read, be prepared to face the fact that not everything is what it seems.**

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Darling.

As I watch you, your silken curls, goddess-tresses, spilling upon the pillow like the dark cascade of chocolate, there is a sob waiting to break free from the deep confines of my utter emptiness.

The seething turmoil will not fade, the ache like poisoned honey. The utter abnegation of self, this wretched longing to take you in my arms.

He sleeps in the room opposite, the boy-turned-man in not so many wasting years, and I wonder if he feels his grief as acutely as mine; the awful, screaming emptiness that comes when they whom you love like a desperate, hungry child departs for what seems like eternity.

And your porcelain face is sighing in sleep, bones molded by God if indeed there is such a One, the rosebud lips, the tiny hands, with their perfect little fingernails.

Your eyelids flutter with their dark curved eyelashes, flitting like butterflies as the moonbeams strike your face into perfection of night.

Oh, sweet, do not wake. I don't want to imagine your cries were you to open your dark soulful eyes and see the shape leaning in your balcony.

Your lips part, making memory like lightning through my veins of a taste, a sweetness, and a longing.

How I long now that you were mine. My own. Could there be any greater joy, mon Ange? To know that you were—

Why do I torture myself so, dear? Why? Why do I come here so often to watch you sighing in your slumber, reaching out your arms for the one you cannot find?

And the scream rises, like bile in my throat, and I choke it back though it threatens to unleash upon the stars and the black sky of night, oh, sweet night, my friend, my ally, my protection.

I want to hold you in my arms. I want you to look at me with eyes of swimming childish limpidness and say, "_Papa._ _I love you._"

But more than that I wish your mother…ah, pain…your mother…would be at my side, loving me as fully as I ever loved her in her sweet, gorgeous innocence turned wisdom at the end.

But your mother is…gone….dead…and your father sleeps restlessly in the next room, dreaming mournfully and passionately of his love that I once hoped to spirit away into the night with me, leaving him alone and underground as I had been for so many cruel and aching years.

Darling.

How I wish you were my child. _My _chubby-cheeked five-year-old daughter.

But no. You are…_his_. And I cannot do a thing about it now, except kidnap you, which I would never do. Could never do. Those days are over.

How I wish that I could pluck your mother from the sky, her in whom your face shines with a gloriously aching likeness, the Angel now in heaven, where she truly belongs, though oh…I wanted her to belong with _me…_

Your eyes begin to open. What uncharacteristic longings are awoken in me by the sight of you, darling child…the urge to take you on my knee, to kiss your forehead, to tell you stories…to make you laugh, shriek and giggle with laughter….to make you laugh as _he_ so often does…when he throws you in the air, never too high, and spins around the room with you in his arms, your chubby little legs flying wide, your childish laughter like an elfin-fairy spell.

And what irony…this is Erik, who never wanted children…I, Erik, who thought they'd be a burden, now wishing with all my heartbreak of soul that _I _had sired you with…Her.

Can I even speak her name? Oh, God, can I even think it?

And as I slip away into the early morning shadows, your eyes open fully, and your brow furrows prettily at the strange and fleeting sight you thought you saw with your child's eyes, and decide it is the sunrise playing tricks.

And off I go, to wait another day for when night falls and I can visit you inside your dreams.

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**A/N: To avoid confusion, Erik is watching Christine and Raoul's daughter. Christine is dead. Just in case anybody got mixed up. **


End file.
